Bloody Bremen

The airborne rescue of Mussolini at Gron Sasso in 1943 assured Otto Skorzeny's place in military history. The German special forces officer's role in rile operation has become a military legend, but one question has remained unanswered: What was in that suitcase that Mussolini refused to let go of, even in those mad moments when his getaway plane was plummeting down the side of a cliff?

Some years before the German commando leader's death in 1975, Charles Whiting wrote what was then the definitive biography of Otto Skorzeny. This book, although frequently cited by scholars, has become a collector's item of limited availability to the general public.

Due to his reputation as a Skorzeny expert, Whiting has been sought out over the years by World War II veterans and others with additional information on Skorzeny's wartime and post-war career. Whiting has now produced the new edition of Skorzeny that has long been requested, with new information that Skorzeny did not reveal in his original conversations with the author, or that has been developed from other sources.

Skorzeny went on to conduct other daring operations in Budapest, Vienna and on the collapsing Russian Front, all presented here in extensive detail. As the end of The war approached, Skorzeny's handful of infiltrators wearing U.S. Army uniforms during the Battle of the Bulge caused a major panic among American leaders and led them to brand him "The most dangerous man in Europe."

Skorzeny led an interesting life after the war, but many writers have found it difficult to distinguish fact from fantasy. Whiting covers Skorzeny's various war crimes trials, his eventual "escape" from Allied custody, and his post-waractivities, including his service as an adviser To Nasser in Egypt and his involvement with Evita Peron in Argentina.