Trudy Gold
Wolfgang Lotz: The Champagne Spy

Trudy Gold - Wolfgang Lotz: The Champagne Spy

- Good evening, everyone, from London, where the storm is about to start. Tonight, I am going to talk about a man who is quite extraordinary, a spy, a reckless character, a hero, or was he just a complete daredevil, and, of course, today, it’s Wolfgang Lotz, “The Champagne Spy”. He was the spy in Egypt as Eli Cohen, of course, was the spy in Damascus, but his end is very different. So, who was Wolfgang Lotz, and why was it that he was such a good spy for Israel? So, let’s have a look at the first slide, please. There you see him as an older man with his autobiography, which is called “The Champagne Spy”. Can we go to the first slide, please? He’s born in Mannheim in Germany. He had a Jewish mother, who was an actress, but completely nonobservant, and a German father. His father was a theatre director. His mother was so irreligious that he wasn’t even circumcised, and later on, that is going to prove to be very, very useful. By the early ‘30s, his parents had divorced, and he, of course, can we see the next slide, please? I don’t need to tell you what happened, of course. When Hitler came to power in Germany, what he was committed to was a unAryan Reich, and his mother, Lotz’s mother, took the opportunity of taking her young son, and off they went to mandated Palestine. So, let’s have a look at Tel Aviv in the '30s. Now, you see, that will bring back a few memories for the older ones amongst us, but Tel Aviv in the '30, it’s still quite a small city, but it’s becoming relatively cosmopolitan because of the huge influx of German Jews, and later, Austrian Jews.

They were a very middle-class community. They tended to be city dwellers, and they are going to alter the theatre in Palestine, the cafe society in Palestine, and, of course, the architecture in Palestine. When in Palestine, she resumes her acting career. The Habima Theatre is becoming quite an important theatre, and as a pretty famous actress already in Germany, she does well in Tel Aviv. Now, it’s at this stage her son takes the name Ze'ev. He calls himself Ze'ev Gur-Arie. He studied at an agricultural college, Beit Shemesh, and he is an excellent horse rider. He’s blonde, he’s blue-eyed, he has perfect German, and he loves horse riding. Of course, it’s mandated Palestine. All the problems were British rule, and, of course, the Arabs, and in 1936, he joins the Haganah, and by the time he’s 15 years old, he’s already involved on horseback patrols and guard duty. Can we come to the next slide, please? Can we go onto the next one? That’s the Haganah, and, of course, let’s have a look, this is the British Army in Egypt. Of course, when World War I finally breaks out, one of the main British bases in the Middle East is, of course, in Egypt, and he volunteers for the British Army, and they take him up. Why? He’s blonde, he’s blue-eyed, he has perfect German, and he’s stationed in Egypt, and he’s got a hugely reckless personality. He also is a brilliant horse rider, and that’s going to be important in the story. He joined a British intelligence unit. Because he had perfect German, he also had Hebrew, Arabic, English, and German, he was interrogating German prisoners of war, which, later on, is going to be invaluable because of all the stories he could tell and the picture he could make. And after the war, he returns to Palestine.

Again, he’s working for the Haganah, and if you remember the events between '45 and '48, after the Holocaust, the Jews of Palestine were determined they had to open the gates of Palestine, and, of course, the running of the refugees, the looking for arms, and this is one of the things he’s involved in. He becomes an arms smuggler for the Haganah. They were scouring Europe. Europe was awash with arms at the end of the Second World War. They’re either buying them or stealing them, or having them donated, and between '45 and '48, he’s very much into that. He marries, in 1948, a sabra called Rivka, and he has a son by her, Oded. When Israel is created, he joins the IDF, and let’s have a look at the War of Independence. By the time we come to the War of Independence, he is already a captain in the Israeli Army. So, he’s involved, can we go on with the next slide, he’s involved in the Battle of Latrun. By Suez, 1956, of course, Suez, he is already a Major, and he commands an infantry division. Now, after the 1956 war, he is recruited by the Israeli Intelligence Service. Let’s have a look at Amal. He is recruited by Amal. There’s the Sinai Campaign of 1956, where the British, the French, and the Israelis make war on Egypt, and, of course, it’s an absolute disaster politically, but it was an extraordinary victory militarily. But after the Six-Day War, he is recruited by the Israeli Intelligence Service because they need to send him to Egypt to gather intelligence on Gamal Abdel Nasser’s plans. Can we now see the next slide?

There you see, that is military intelligence, and let’s go on now and have a look at Nasser now. Gamal Abdel Nasser called himself the in Egypt. Egypt was, of course, run by King Farouk, and when King Farouk was deposed, he actually said, “By the end of the century, there will only be five kings left in the world, the king of clubs, diamonds, spades, and hearts, and the king of Britain.” Now, interesting, eh, but Gamal Abdel Nasser, there is a colonel’s revolt, and then Gamal Abdel Nasser takes over. He is a secularist. He’s going to play the big powers off against each other. Think Cold War. Think of the rivalry now between the Americans and the Russians. We’re now dealing in a world where the Cold War is the prime motif. The British are more and more discredited, and Gamal Abdel Nasser has a dream of Arab unity and Arab independence, and it’s under his authority that the United Arab Republic is created, that between 1958 and 1961, there is a union of Egypt and Syria. This is very important because what they’re working for is not a separate Egypt with a separate Syria, a separate Iraq. What they want is to go back to the dream of the old Arab empires. Never forget that the followers of Muhammad, within 100 years of his death, created the largest land empire the world has ever known. It stretched from the south of France all the way to Pakistan. Take that on, the Arab empire, and here you have Nasser in power. He’s wrested it away from Farouk. It’s being wrested away from the corrupt colonials, and he’s going to play the power game between Russia and America, and more interesting than that, he needs a unifying factor to unify all the warring Arab countries, and that factor happens to be Israel. One of the reasons behind the Sinai Campaign was that he was allowing gangs, or fedayeen, to enter Israel from the Egyptian border, attack the kibbutzim, and kill civilians, and the point is, whilst Nasser is in power, Egypt is now awash with Nazis.

So, let’s have a look at some of those Nazis. There were over five thousand ex-Nazis working in Syria and in Egypt, involved in all sorts of activities for the Egyptians and the Syrians, and some of them were very, very nasty indeed. I’m bringing some of them to your attention. This is a separate field of study, but it is fascinating to know just how many of the Nazi leadership actually finished up in the Arab world, and also, never forget that under 10, under 10% of those guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes were ever brought to justice, and it’s something I’m going to be addressing next week when I look at the Simon Wiesenthal story. And here you see Johann von Leers. His dates are 1902 to 1965. He had once worked for Goebbels. He was one of Goebbels’ bright, young things. He had written 12 books. He was full of anti-Semitic rhetoric. He was pro-Arab. He believed that the Arabs were, in fact, a superior race. He is violently anti-Israel, and he escapes. He adores Haj Amin al-Husseini. It’s Husseini who brings him to Egypt. He converts to Islam, and he actually takes on the name Omar Amin, after his great hero. He has a huge talent for languages. He actually had, in the end, before he left Germany, I was wrong about the number of books, he actually wrote 27 books. He had a huge talent for languages. What happens is he escaped, first of all, to South America, to Argentina. He was virtually number two to Goebbels. He escaped to Argentina through the ratline, which was through Red Cross passports out of the Vatican, supplied by an Austrian bishop called Alois Hudal, to Perón’s Argentina, where there is a huge expat Nazi community. And then, he is brought, in 1955, Perón is overthrown, and he is brought to Egypt mainly because of the interference of Haj Amin al-Husseini, who he becomes very, very close to.

And what does he do in Cairo? He actually becomes the political advisor and he’s head of the anti-Israel propaganda department for Nasser. Okay. And also, there were other characters, who I couldn’t find pictures for, actually. I’ll come onto him in a minute, but I’m going to mention Leopold Gleim, who becomes head of Egypt’s State Security. He’d been formally head of Jewish Affairs in Poland, and he was involved, ironically, in the mass expulsion of Egyptian Jews post ‘56. Within three months of Sinai, over 10,000 Egyptian Jews had been forced to flee, and this is the report in The New York Times, “The methods are so similar to what Hitler did before the war as to be frightening.” He was working with other former SS officers because now, particularly after the fall of Perón, many of them find their way to Nasser’s Egypt. Let’s have a look at the next one, Aribert Heim, a particularly evil man. If you want to know about the pyramid of evil, he’s called Dr. Death of Mauthausen. We’re not sure when he died. There’s a question mark by 1992. He was a doctor. He was a doctor of medicine. Isn’t it fascinating? There was a terrible case recently in England, I’m sure you’ve all heard about it, about this nurse who murdered babies, and we are horrified because she was part of the caring profession. If I tell you that the highest recruits to the Nazi party were doctors, followed by the legal profession and the professorial profession. So, never think that Nazism was a, it was never, ever a gutter-up movement. The majority of those who sat around the table at Wannsee had doctorates from Germany’s top universities. According to witnesses, in the camps, he worked with a pharmacist called Erich Wasicky. They performed appalling experiments.

They had so dehumanised their victims, or did they themselves become so dehumanised, they would perform operations without anaesthetics. They used skulls as paperweights. They were absolutely, absolutely horrific. He managed to survive the war. He escaped. He became a gynaecologist, and later on, he escapes to Egypt, and later on, when he finds out that there’s a warrant out for his arrest, he goes from Egypt, then he finishes up in Syria, and the Wiesenthal Centre tried so hard to find him. They know, obviously, he’s dead now, but the date of his death, and in Syria, he also practised as a doctor. So, a particularly horrific character. Let’s go on. There you see Alois Brunner. Born in Austria, he joins the Nazi party. He joined the SA. He actually worked in the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. He became its director in 1939. He was number two to Adolf Eichmann, and following the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, he went to accelerate the expulsion of Czech Jews. He is Eichmann’s right-hand man. He was responsible for deporting 56,000 Austrian Jews. He’s then transferred to Berlin, where he organises the deportations from France and Slovakia. He is a major war criminal. We know that he was also, personally, incredibly cruel and sadistic, and I’m not going to read about those things. You can read it if you like. Robert Wistricht wrote a very interesting anthology, “Who’s Who in Nazi Germany”, if we don’t want to read the detailed biographies. Towards the end of the war, he deports 43,000 Jews from Vienna, 46,000 from Salonika. He was sent, in '44 by Eichmann, to Slovakia to oversee the deportation. So, when the Germans are winning the war, he is, or losing the war, he is one of those fanatics who is there, at the end, killing as many as possible. He was also, he’d been commandant at Drancy.

In the last days of the war, he managed to deport another 13,500 Slovakian Jews to Theresienstadt. It’s estimated that that man you are looking at was responsible for the deportation of 120,000 people to their deaths. He fled West Germany on a fake Red Cross passport, first to Rome, then to Egypt, where he works as a weapons dealer for Nasser, and then he goes to Syria, where he becomes known as Dr. Georg Fischer, and he worked as a government advisor. He was interviewed in 1985 by a West German magazine, and he claimed he had received official documents under a fake name from the American authorities and he worked as a driver for the Americans. He is wanted by Wiesenthal and Klarsfeld, and in the late '80s, communist East Germany actually negotiated to have him extradited from Syria, but the fall of the Berlin severed contracts. We don’t really know what happened to him, but obviously he’s dead now. In 2011, Der Spiegel reported that the German intelligence service had destroyed its file on him. Had he been working for them? Had he been working for the Americans? Now, in that interview, in the Chicago Sun interview, he said, “All the Jews deserved to die because they were the devil’s agents and human garbage.” Now, he lived, right up until the '90s, in Damascus, meeting with foreigners, particularly East German nationals, but whilst he’s in Egypt, of course, who is he working for? He is working for Nasser as an arms dealer. So, it’s fascinating just how many of these characters were working, and as I said to you, there were over 5,000 of them in Egypt and in Syria.

Another character who was there was a man called Walter Rauff, who’d been an aide to Heydrich, so you’re looking at a really, really ghastly group of individuals. Anyway, can we go on, please? I’m just giving you a taster. Now, that is a military, that is the Military Parade of 1962. Now, let’s go back to Lotz because, already, Israel, keep it at that picture now, already, Israel is worried about what is going on in Egypt because Nasser is building up an arsenal, and also, if there’s another war, the Russians are beginning to supply Egypt with equipment. They really need to know what is going on. And we know that Lotz is recruited as early as 1957 by the Israeli Intelligence Service. They want to send him to Egypt to gather intelligence. Now, they realise that he’s got all the qualifications. He said, he wrote about it in his autobiography. “I was blonde, a hard drinker, the very epitome of a German officer.” Also, he’s brave, he’s reckless, he is a superb actor, and he has to need a front. Mossad needs to know all about the German advisors who are flooding in. He’s got to get to the centre of German life in Egypt, so what they do is they have to create an incredible cover story. So, they send him to Germany. Remember, he’s got perfect German in 1959 to establish his cover. He is a German businessman, he’s ex-Wehrmacht, he’d served in North Africa, and he was a former Nazi.

And don’t forget, then, in Egypt, under the British, he’d had experience interrogating prisoners of war, so that gave him a lot of background, and his story was that after the war, he had fled to Australia for 11 years, where he had become a horse breeder. His dream was to go to Egypt to establish a riding school. Remember, he’s a great storyteller. He has lots of stories of North Africa from his time with the British. So, the dream is they’re going to send him to Egypt with a lot of money. The Mossad have opened up its coffers. He’s going to make contact in Egyptian high society, and this personable, blonde, blue-eyed, uncircumcised Israeli is going to pass, they hope, as a member of the ex-Nazi coterie in Egypt. So, he arrives in Cairo in December, 1960, as Russian equipment is powering into Egypt and Syria, the United Arab Republic, and he very quickly establishes contact with high-ranking army officials and military personnel. He’s got a lot of money. He has an expensive flat. He invites them all in for champagne, parties, party girls. This is the story. And he travelled to Paris in June, 1961, for a meeting with his handlers, Mossad. Again, he’s given more money and a transporter to communicate secret messages with the Israelis. And his married, remember, but his marriage is not very, very good, and during his train journey to Egypt, he meets a beautiful German woman called Waltraud. He fell for her. Despite the fact he’s already married, he decides to marry her, and Mossad was absolutely furious. They even considered releasing him, but his mission was too important, and they allowed his new wife to join him.

She soon discovered, now there’s lots of stories. You see, one of the problems with these spy stories is who’s telling the truth. According to some sources, she was a West German agent who was worried about Nasser’s flirtation with the Russians. Remember, East Germany. Or was she just a woman who believed her husband was working for NATO and decided to help him? And this is what he said about his wife, he never divorced the other one, “A tall, extremely pretty, blue-eyed blonde with a curvaceous figure, just my type.” And when he returns to Cairo with his new wife, the head of the Egyptian police, his new best friend, was there to pick him up, to actually pick him up at the airport. He is becoming more and more close to all these characters. In fact, one of the generals actually warned Lotz about another German. He said, “Be careful of him. We think he’s an industrialist, but we know he is the spy for the Bonn government. We know that the information he gets is passed on to the CIA,” and this is what the chap says to Lotz. “Forgive me for saying so, but you are a little naive about the dirty business of espionage. I thought I had better warn you.” Lotz, also, pretends to be a rabid anti-Semite. He is now in the inner circle of the SS, and remember, the SS are incredibly important in the jobs they are now doing for the Egyptians. He’s got this virtually limitless spending account. Colonel Mohse Said, who’s a key figure in Egyptian military intelligence, becomes a very close friend, and now, there is a very, very, there’s a real problem. What is that problem? Can we see the next slide, please?

Egypt, when Egypt launches, in fact, go back just for a minute, if you don’t mind. Sorry. 1962 is absolutely key. Why? Because Egypt has already fired a rocket, and not only that. Look, these are the weapons that are on display on July the 23rd, 1962, in a military parade. This is Nasser showing the world his new rockets. How has he got them? He is not just getting them from Russia. He is getting them from whom? He is recruiting senior engineers and scientists, some who had worked on Peenemünde. Now, I should mention before that that Lotz is so well informed that he was already invited to visit secret bases near the Suez Canal. He was allowed access to airports, where the Egyptians were stationing their MiG fighters. He took photos with the pilots standing by the planes. You know, this character full of bonhomie, he gets the pilots, “Look, this is a picture for your girlfriend.” He is going into military secret bases. He sees the arms depots. His friends in the high command are proud of them. They want to show their German friend, who’s got this wonderful riding school and a beautiful wife, they want to show him how well they’re doing. So, he’s visiting the secret bases. He’s getting pictures of the air hangers. The Israelis, what they need also is details of the SAM missiles being built near Suez. Now, this was absolutely off limits, but he took photographs and was arrested, but he told the commander of the base and all the high-ranking officials who he was, and they made a phone call, “He is fine.” The Egyptians also boasted to him that they had such, or not only did they boast to him about the planes they had, they said that they’d been advised to set up dummies. Now, his information was so extraordinary that I’m sure you know that during the Six-Day War, the Israeli Intelligence was such that they bombed the real planes and left the mockups, and that was because of the knowledge that they had acquired from Wolfgang Lotz.

Now, of course, Nasser is recruiting Nazi scientists. Can we see the next slides, please? This really worried Isser Harel. Isser Harel is, of course, the head of Mossad, a fascinating man. You know, his next-door neighbours in Israel thought he was just a civil servant. He’d been born in Vitebsk, you know, the same city, of course, of Marc Chagall. He came from a very wealthy family, a very large family. At the time of the Revolution, he heard Trotsky speak as a young boy. Because they were capitalists, the family fled to Latvia. He is aware of the anti-Semitism, and by 1930, he decides on Palestine. He goes to Palestine, and he becomes the first director of Shin Bet, and later on, of course, he is the man behind the capture of Adolf Eichmann. Now, what he needs to know is what is going on with the Nazi scientists in Egypt, and what he needs to do is to turn, of course, to Lotz to ask Lotz to get information for him now. Remember, Lotz is very close to Youssef Ali Gahourab, who’s head of the police, and also General Osman, head of the security service, who’s in charge of all the bases and the factories, and also one of Nasser’s closest advisors, also is very close. And now, his job has been widened. We don’t just want you to find out about the Nazis and what they’re up to and the aeroplanes , we need to know about the Nazi scientists, also because they had heard from another Mossad informer about Factory 333, where the Nazi scientists, well, the ex-Nazi scientists were working.

Many of the people from Peenemünde had been recruited, and what were they working on? They were working on rockets, and they were also attaching noxious substances to the rockets. To fire where? Of course, to fire on Israel. Now, how could it be deterred? Let’s have a look at some of the scientists. Let’s have a look at the project manager. That, by the way, is Yitzhak Shamir. He’s much older there, but he was the man who ran the agents who were to try and break the Nazi scientists in Egypt. So, the boss is Harel. Shamir, who was a Revisionist Zionist, Shamir is a fascinating character. His father had been murdered in the war in Poland by Poles, and evidently, a survivor of that massacre said that his father’s last words were, “My son will avenge me,” and it, of course, was Yitzhak Shamir who was behind the assassination of Lord Moyne during the mandate in Palestine. So, he is a very hardliner, and now he is working for Mossad, and he is in charge of what they called Operation Damocles, the sword of Damocles being held over Israel, and what he has to do is to get the information. So, one of the most important scientists is Eugen Sänger. Let’s go on. Have a look at Sänger. Now, Eugen Sänger, he’d been born in the Habsburg Empire. He was one of the most important scientists in the world. He’d studied technical engineering in Graz and in Vienna. He’d switched to aeronautics. He was a genius. In fact, his career was kind of stymied by Wernher von Braun, who saw him as a complete rival, and also, don’t forget morality. Where does morality come into all of this, because many of the top German scientists were later taken in by the Americans and the Russians? And Wernher von Braun, he went on to become head of the American Space Programme, and I’m sure, because we have to lighten things occasionally, you will know the great song of Tom Lera called “Wernher von Braun”, and that line, “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

That’s not my department, says Wernher von Braun. In German and in English, I know how to count down, and I’m learning Chinese, says Wernher von Braun.” But he also goes a way to explaining it’s the Cold War, it’s a new world. We know that many of these characters worked for the CIA, just as in East Germany. Many of the ex-Nazis worked for the Soviets. So, basically, the whole notion of crimes against humanity and punishment is a very, very complicated one, but I want to deal with that when I deal with the life and times of Simon Wiesenthal. So, his thesis had been rocket-powered flights, and during the war, he worked on technology. After the war, he went to France, where he founded, in 1949, the Fédération Astronautique. He was very important. The Soviets unsuccessfully tried to recruit him. He becomes the first President of the International Astronautical Society. He marries his assistant, who is a brilliant mathematician and engineer. In 1954, he returned to Germany, where, in 1960, he works at the jet propulsion institute in Stuttgart. But many of the German scientists were, they were very, they were disappointed by what they were allowed to do in West Germany. Remember, Germany was not re-arming. And consequently, in 1960, he was given the opportunity to go to Egypt to work for Nasser as part of the United Arab Republic on the Al-Zafir missile, the missile, the short-range ballistic missile. So, he’s very, very important, and also, he recruits many of his colleagues to work with him. Now, what happens is he has to be stopped.

They all have to be stopped. There’s a whole group of Nazi scientists working in Egypt, and how are they going to be stopped? This is where there is new information given to Wolfgang Lotz. What they need from him now is he needs to inform them of not just the German scientists working in Egypt, he needs the names and addresses of their families also in Germany and in Austria. This is when another character, who I’m going to talk about in a minute, a man called Otto Skorzeny, who was also an ex-Nazi, is going to get involved in it. So, basically, Wolfgang Lotz, his job is to help, and there are other people working on it under Shamir, under Harel. Their job is to ferret out the names and addresses of the Nazis and to deter them. So, how are they going to be deterred? A man called Hassan Kamil, who was an Egyptian-Swiss arms dealer, was also providing recruits from Switzerland. And so, you’ve got all these characters now. And also, by mid-August '62, Nasser had a document written by another important German scientist called Wolfgang Pilz. This is all happening at Factory 333, and this is where the German scientists have to be deterred. And, of course, it was immortalised in fiction by Frederick Forsyth in a book I’m sure many of you know, or a film called “The Odessa File”. Now, it’s fiction, but much of it is true. What is certainly true is that a parcel bomb was sent to Wolfgang Pilz. It exploded in his office and injured his secretary. A bomb was sent to a rocket factory, which killed five workers. There were attacks in Germany on firms that were supplying Egypt. Heinz Krug, who was the chief of a big Munich company supplying military hardware to Egypt, disappeared in September, 1962, and letters were sent, and this is a letter. “Your name appears on a black list of German scientists,” “on our black list,” this is a Mossad letter. “Your name now appears on our black list of German scientists employed in Egypt.

We would like to think that you care for the safety of your wife, Elizabeth, and your two children, Niels and Trudi. It would be in your interest to cease working for the Egyptian military.” So, also what’s happening is letter bombs, threats, et cetera, and it’s going on and on and on. What happens, though, unfortunately, there was public exposure. Two Mossad agents were arrested in Switzerland for threatening the daughter of a West German electronics expert who was working at Factory 333. They were also arrested for coercion on behalf of a foreign state. Were they involved in the abduction of Krug, who had disappeared? There was a huge public scandal. Remember the relations between Israel and West Germany, which Ben-Gurion was very keen on. Germany was supplying Israel with a lot of money, a lot of goods. Golda Meir and Ben-Gurion are absolutely furious. Harel, the head of the Mossad, since the capture of Eichmann, he had become much more hardened. Remember Eichmann, all the events of the show, how on earth do you deal in these situations? Working for him is Yitzhak Shamir, who not only believed that the Germans were the perpetrators and all their accomplices, but he also believed that the allies themselves were complicit in the murder of the Jews. So, the attitudes have hardened, and it led to Harel resigning. He’s forced to resign, and, in fact, Shamir resigns in protest. Within a few months, Ben-Gurion’s government actually fell, but nevertheless, it did deter the scientists, and by the end of 1964, they had all left Egypt, but it just gives you a notion of what Nasser was up to. But meanwhile, I’m going to talk a little bit, and I’ll go back to what happened to Wolfgang Lotz, but I want to talk about another absolutely fascinating character who is also involved in this scandal of trying to deter the Nazi scientists, and it’s a German called Otto Skorzeny. You know, we’re now in the world of espionage. Can we see the next slide, please? Here you see Otto Skorzeny. You see the duelling scar?

That’s him in his SS uniform, 1908 to 1975. He was born in Vienna. He came from a lower-middle class background. He studied engineering. He was another daredevil, reckless type. He got that scar in a duelling fraternity. He joined the Nazi party in 1931 in Austria, when it was still illegal, and after the invasion of Poland, this tall, reckless individual becomes one of Hitler’s, he tries to join Hitler’s bodyguard. He first tried to join the Air Force, but he was turned down because he was tall, too tall, so he becomes one of Hitler’s bodyguards. He’s reckless, he’s a daredevil. He is wounded, he’s awarded the Iron Cross, and because he’s badly wounded, he has to have a staff job in Berlin, and he is one who develops the ideas of unconventional warfare. He trains people to go deep behind enemy lines and sabotage, how to disguise themselves in enemy uniforms. He becomes a close friend of Ernst Kaltenbrunner, one of the most obscene characters the world has ever known. After the assassination of Heydrich, he takes over his department, and it was he who really suggests that Skorzeny train people in clandestine operations, and he is involved in many of the most reckless events that the Third Reich put together, for example, Operation François. He’s parachuted into Iran to make contact with the dissident mountain people, to encourage them to revolt against the allies. He then is in Belarus, involved in deep raids in the forests of Belarus, which ironically come up against the Bielski, who were an extraordinary Jewish partisan group, who were fighting in Belarus. Operation Oak, September '43, the Rescue of Mussolini.

Operation Long Jump, the plan to assassinate the “Big Three” at Tehran. It doesn’t happen, but then the Operation Knight’s Leap, an attempt to capture Tito alive, and then Operation Armoured Fist, which does succeed, to kidnap Miklós Horthy to force his father to resign in favour of the fascists, the head of the Arrow Cross. Operation Gryphon, he’s up to his neck in disinformation during the Battle of the Bulge, The end of the war, Operation Werwolf, Nazi resistance in Europe post-war, the idea that the Nazis would go into the forests to regroup after the assassination of Hitler. He had been awarded the highest honour, the Oak Leaves Cross to the Knight’s Cross. After the war, he’s interned. He’s tried for violating the rules of war, wearing enemy uniform. Ironically, he’s acquitted as the allies did the same. An SOE man, called Yeo-Thomas, gave evidence in his defence. A lot of characters admired Skorzeny. He was a daredevil. He was detained in Darmstadt awaiting Nazification. He probably was helped to escape by Americans. He held out for a long time on a farm, which was rented by Hjalmar Schacht’s niece, a Countess, who he later married. He was very attractive to women. He escapes with his wife to Madrid. He published his memoirs, and because of the publicity, he flees, and where does he flee to? He becomes an advisor to Naguib and then to Nasser in Egypt, probably at the instigation of the CIA. We are into the world of double-dealing. He recruits staff, made up of the SS and Wehrmacht, to help train the Egyptian army. Amongst them, General Wilhelm Fahrmbacher and Oskar Munzel, who had been head of the Gestapo in Poland. He was the one who brought in Leopold Gleim, who I already talked about. He also trained Arab volunteers in commando tactics against the Israelis.

He led Palestinian raids into Gaza. He stayed on with Nasser. He travels between Spain and Argentina. He’s an advisor to Perón, a bodyguard to Eva Perón. He’s fostering the ambition for a Fourth Reich in South America. What on earth is going on? Why am I telling you about this guy? Because in 1963, he is recruited by the Mossad, and this is confirmed by Harel in his book. Why on earth did he decide to help the Mossad? Evidently, one of the reasons given is he was fed up with being on Wiesenthal’s wanted list. The price was that Wiesenthal would remove him. Wiesenthal refused, but he decided to help anyway. Was it because he wanted yet another adventure? Evidently, he’d been visited in Spain by the Mossad, and he becomes involved. He was probably the man behind the assassination of Krug. He certainly was responsible for mailing a letter bomb that killed five Egyptians. He also helped with the names of Nazi scientists. However, he also helped get Nazis out of Europe, and he founded and advised the leadership in Spain, Spain’s neo-Nazis. He established a group in 1966. He bought a farm in Ireland. They refused to give him permanent residency, so he was there six months of the year. In the late 1960s, he established something called the Paladin Group, strategic assault personnel. They trained guerrilla groups. They worked for the South African Bureau of State Security, carried out attacks for the Greek military junta. This is a man who sold his soul to everybody. In 1970, he developed cancer. He fought it for five years. In 1975, he had a huge Catholic funeral in the cathedral in Madrid. His coffin was draped in Nazi colours, and the funeral was attended by dozens of Nazis who gave the Hitler salute, according to the Mossad who were covering the event. But nevertheless, this man was recruited by Mossad and would have become well-known to whom?

Of course, to Lotz. Now, Lotz, remember, he’s still in Egypt. Even though the scientists have left, he’s needed because the Russians are supplying arms and equipment, and they need all the information he gives them. Remember, he’s still a great friend of the Egyptian high command. They have no notion that he had anything to do with this, with the Nazi scientists. However, in 1965, Walter Ulbricht, the East German head of state, visited Egypt. Remember, Nasser is playing both off against the other. And as a gesture, he arrests 30 West Germans, which included some of the Nazi scientists, some of the Nazi people who were working for him, the scientists had gone, but also Lotz. Lotz and his wife and his wife’s parents are arrested on February the 27th in 1965. Lotz thinks that, in fact, he has been rumbled. Sorry about that, everyone. I’m now, I’m afraid, in my bedroom, where the hub is, so I apologise for that. So, what happens is that he gives a contrary statement, that Lotz gives a contrary statement that, in fact, he was using his wireless set. That was, in fact, found. Now, he and his wife are put on trial. The Israelis paid for him to have an excellent German lawyer and also ensured a German observer from the embassy. He’s guilty. He’s sentenced to life imprisonment and hard labour, his wife is given three years, but what happens is his personality is such that he manages to captivate the guards in prison, and he has a reasonable time.

And then, after the 1967 war, he is exchanged. There’s a prisoner exchange. He is exchanged for 500 Egyptian prisoners of wealth, including nine generals. So, what happens then, he goes back to Israel and then, when his wife died, he goes to Munich. He lives in Israel. When she died, he never went back to his first wife. He then went to Munich. He was one of these characters who was totally, you know, he’s got a reckless personality. He goes off to Munich, and he wrote a number of books. Then he runs a sports department and meets a beautiful young journalist, who’s very interested in his life. He marries her. They live in a luxurious apartment, where he lives in Germany until his death in 1993. Can we see the next slide, please? Now, back in 1982, though, his close friend, Ariel Sharon, had called him to Israel because the Israelis had got very, very bad press and they wanted him to deal with the foreign press, which he did. So, he remained close to Ariel Sharon. Let’s see the last slide. That’s what he wrote in his book. So, what can I tell you about people like Lotz? Unlike Skorzeny, they were just these daredevil characters, but I think, also, what I’ve shown in this presentation was just how dirty that world was, particularly in terms of bringing Nazi war criminals to justice. So, shall we have a look at the questions? Can you do the questions for me? For some reason, they’ve disappeared.

• [Lauren] Yes, that’s because you rejoined.

Q&A and Comments:

• I missed the part about what happened after Lotz was arrested. Oh, but they never did. Basically, that was the point, until, look, he confessed. He confessed that he was a German, but then, in the trial, he goes to prison as a German, okay, he’s given hard labour. He would’ve been executed if they thought he was an Israeli. It’s only when the Israelis asked for him in return for nine. They offer to give back nine Egyptian generals and Lotz. Okay? 500 Egyptian prisoners were exchanged, including nine generals.

Q: What was his major contribution to Israel?

A: Stopping, I think, look, think of the Six-Day War. What happened in the Six-Day War? Do you remember? The Israelis, look, the Israelis had to, they took a terrible chance. They left three planes guarding Israel when they destroyed the Egyptian Air Force and the Syrian Air Force. They had such good information from Lotz. They even knew which were the real planes and which were the dummies. He gave them information during a period of war. That was the point. The Jewish exodus from Egypt, Lorna, that is told, in fact, I think we’ve already had sessions on that from Lynn Julius. He was caught because, well, there are stories. He’s imprisoned because Nasser wants him in prison because he’s entertaining the East German head of state. He’d arrested some of the Germans as well. He’d arrested some of the ex-Nazis as a show of gesture, and they were going to be let out the minute the visit was over, but he thought he’d been rumbled, so that’s when he confessed.

Are there any other questions?

• [Lauren] It doesn’t seem like it.

• I’m sorry about what happened. I hope it didn’t spoil it for many of you. How long was I off?

• Just a couple of minutes. I think we’re okay.

• Okay, all right, I will see you all next week. Look after yourselves and have a good weekend. Thank you, Lauren.