Mossad and the Nazi it hired.
In 1962, to stop ex-Nazi rocket scientists from building missiles for Nasser's Egypt, Israel's Mossad recruited another ex-Nazi — Otto Skorzeny, the SS commando who once rescued Mussolini — as its own agent. The paradox is real, it is documented, and Israel's own investigative press established it.
The campaign was Operation Damocles. Between 1962 and 1963, Mossad director Isser Harel ran letter bombs, threats, and killings against the German scientists working at Egypt's Factory 333. One businessman supplying that program, Heinz Krug, vanished from Munich on September 11, 1962. In the same window, Mossad turned Skorzeny into an informant against the very scientists it was hunting. This piece grades every load-bearing claim against the record, and it is explicit about the one place two credible accounts disagree.
Primary reporting includes the Raviv & Melman investigation in The Forward (2016), Ronen Bergman's Rise and Kill First (2018), and Times of Israel on the Globke leverage.
What this page is about
In the early 1960s, Egypt hired former German rocket scientists — several of them Nazi-era Peenemünde veterans — to build missiles aimed at Israel at a facility known as Factory 333. Israel's Mossad answered with Operation Damocles (1962–63): letter bombs, intimidation, and killings. In November 1962, parcel bombs sent to the scientists killed five Egyptians and blinded a German secretary. The chief of a Munich front company supplying the program, Heinz Krug, disappeared on September 11, 1962, and was killed.
The strangest documented turn: to spy on those scientists, Mossad recruited Otto Skorzeny — the former SS-Obersturmbannführer who led the 1943 raid that rescued Mussolini. That recruitment, long rumored, was established in 2016 by an Israeli-and-American investigative team. The account is grim realpolitik, not ideology: Israel used one Nazi to stop others.
This record was assembled and broken largely by Israeli and mainstream journalists — Ronen Bergman (who drew on Mossad sources for Rise and Kill First), Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman (The Forward / Haaretz, 2016), and the historian R.T. Howard. That provenance matters: this is documented Israeli intelligence history, not a fringe or antisemitic construction. Where the assassination specifics rest on former-operative testimony rather than an open court record, the grade says so.
We are not saying Israel or the Mossad was sympathetic to Nazism. The opposite is the point: Israel hired an ex-Nazi as a tool against a threat to Israeli lives. That is a statement about ruthless tradecraft, not ideology.
We are not asserting the most cinematic version of Heinz Krug's death as settled fact. Two credible accounts disagree on how he died; we grade that dispute openly in §6 and do not pick a winner the record cannot support.
We are not claiming the West German leverage amounted to one-way blackmail. The record shows mutual leverage and a tacit trade between Bonn and Jerusalem, which is a different and better-documented thing.
To stop ex-Nazis building missiles for Egypt, Israel recruited an ex-Nazi of its own.
The clean story of the postwar era is that there were Nazis and there were the people who hunted them, and the line between them was bright. The record of Operation Damocles complicates that line without erasing it. Israel was hunting German scientists who had chosen to build weapons for a state sworn to destroy it. To do the hunting, Israel enlisted Otto Skorzeny, a man near the top of any honest list of dangerous Nazis.
This is not a hypocrisy story and not a gotcha. It is a study in what a young state facing an existential missile threat was willing to do, and whom it was willing to use. The same decade that produced the Eichmann trial — Israel's great public act of Nazi accountability — also produced a secret handshake with Skorzeny and a quiet deal with Bonn to soften disclosures about an ex-Nazi in Adenauer's inner circle. Both things are true, and holding them together is the whole point.
1943 to 2018: from the Mussolini rescue to the record being written down.
- Sept 1943SS commando Otto Skorzeny leads the glider raid that frees the deposed Benito Mussolini from Gran Sasso, making him one of the Reich's most celebrated soldiers.
- 1945-1951Germany is defeated and denazified. Skorzeny is tried and acquitted at Dachau (1947), escapes internment, and settles in Franco's Spain. In the US zone, the CIA stands up the Gehlen Organization from Reinhard Gehlen's ex-Wehrmacht intelligence network.
- c. 1956Gehlen's organization — soon the West German BND — opens a clandestine liaison with Israel's intelligence services, sharing material on Arab militaries.
- March 14, 1960David Ben-Gurion and Konrad Adenauer meet at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. The public meeting fronts a secret understanding: West German loans and military aid to Israel. Times of Israel.
- May 1960 - 1961Mossad captures Adolf Eichmann in Argentina; his 1961 Jerusalem trial raises the prospect that Israel could expose ex-Nazis in Bonn, above all Adenauer's chancellery chief Hans Globke.
- 1959-1961German aerospace figures — Wolfgang Pilz, Eugen Sänger, Paul Goercke — contract with Egypt and relocate a team of roughly 35 scientists to build surface-to-surface missiles at Factory 333 near Cairo.
- July 1962Egypt test-fires and then parades the Al-Zafir and Al-Kahira missiles through Cairo, alarming Israel. Al-Zafir (Wikipedia).
- Aug 1962Mossad director Isser Harel launches Operation Damocles to terrorize the scientists into quitting. Operation Damocles (Wikipedia).
- Sept 11, 1962Heinz Krug — head of Intra, a Munich front company procuring rocket hardware for Egypt — disappears and is killed in a Mossad operation. His body is never recovered. The Forward.
- Nov 27, 1962Parcel bombs addressed to Wolfgang Pilz detonate at Factory 333, killing five Egyptians; Pilz's secretary Hannelore Wende is maimed and blinded in one eye.
- 1962-1963Mossad recruits Otto Skorzeny in Spain to inform on the German scientists. Yosef Ra'anan manages the operation; Rafi Eitan and Avraham Ahituv handle Skorzeny directly; Yitzhak Shamir — a future prime minister — heads the targeted-killing unit over the campaign. The Forward.
- Feb 1963An assassination attempt on scientist Hans Kleinwächter in Germany fails when the weapon malfunctions.
- March 1963After the campaign becomes a diplomatic liability, Ben-Gurion forces Isser Harel's resignation, effectively ending Operation Damocles.
- 2016 / 2018Raviv and Melman publish the Skorzeny recruitment in The Forward; Ronen Bergman's Rise and Kill First follows in 2018 — with a differing account of how Krug died.
The scientists, the spymasters, the ex-Nazi asset, and the officials who looked away.
Led the 1943 Mussolini rescue. Postwar, he settled in Spain. In 1962–63 Mossad recruited him to inform on the German scientists in Egypt. He is reported to have demanded removal from Simon Wiesenthal's wanted list as a condition.
Ordered the 1962 campaign of letter bombs and killings. Ben-Gurion forced his resignation in March 1963 over its diplomatic fallout.
Ran the special-operations unit over the scientist campaign. Became Israel's prime minister two decades later.
Ra'anan managed the operation; Eitan and Ahituv ran Skorzeny directly. Eitan later confirmed on the record: “Yes, I met and ran Skorzeny.”
Bought rocket components in Europe for the Egyptian program. Disappeared on September 11, 1962, and was killed. His body was never found.
Led the Egyptian missile effort. Pilz is the clearest Peenemünde V-2 veteran; Sänger, an aerospace theorist who headed a Stuttgart institute, left the project early under West German pressure.
A commentator on the Nuremberg racial laws who became Konrad Adenauer's closest aide. The prospect of his exposure at the Eichmann trial is what Bonn most wanted managed.
Ran the CIA-built West German intelligence service, and opened a covert liaison with Mossad from around 1956.
Eight claims about the campaign, each graded, ordered by when the fact occurred.
Egypt hired former German (and Nazi-era) rocket scientists to build missiles at Factory 333.
FACTWolfgang Pilz, Eugen Sänger, and Paul Goercke led a team of roughly 35 German experts who built the Al-Zafir and Al-Kahira missiles for Nasser, paraded in Cairo in July 1962. Nuance: Pilz is the clearest Peenemünde V-2 veteran; Sänger was more theorist than V-2 line engineer and left the project early under West German pressure.
- Newsweek, 'The Secret History of Israel's War Against Hitler's Scientists' (2018)
- Al-Zafir missile (Wikipedia)
- R.T. Howard, Operation Damocles (Pegasus Books, 2013)
Mossad ran Operation Damocles (1962-63) under Isser Harel: letter bombs, threats, and killings against the scientists.
FACTThe campaign is documented in contemporaneous press and later histories. On November 27, 1962, parcel bombs addressed to Wolfgang Pilz killed five Egyptians at Factory 333 and blinded his secretary Hannelore Wende. A February 1963 attempt on scientist Hans Kleinwächter failed. Ben-Gurion ended the operation by forcing Harel out in March 1963.
Heinz Krug, head of the Munich front company Intra, was killed in a Mossad operation on September 11, 1962.
FACTThat Krug vanished on that date and was assassinated as part of the campaign is undisputed across the sources. His body was never recovered. What is contested is the manner of his death — see §6 and the next claim.
- Raviv & Melman, The Forward (2016)
- Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First (Random House, 2018)
Otto Skorzeny personally lured Krug to a forest near Munich and shot him, after which Mossad disposed of the body with acid.
SOME SMOKEThis is the vivid version from the Raviv/Melman reporting, sourced to former Mossad officers. It is genuinely disputed: Ronen Bergman's account instead has Krug abducted to Israel and dying under interrogation. The two leading investigative sources conflict, the body was never found, and the recruitment of Skorzeny is usually dated to 1963 — a timeline that sits awkwardly with a September 1962 forest killing. We record the killing as fact and the mechanism as unresolved.
- Raviv & Melman, The Forward (2016) — forest-shooting account
- Bergman, Rise and Kill First (2018) — died-under-interrogation account
- CovertAction Magazine, 'Who Killed Heinz Krug?' (2025) — skeptical review
Mossad recruited Otto Skorzeny, the former SS commando, as an intelligence asset against the German scientists.
FACTEstablished by the 2016 Forward/Haaretz investigation from interviews with former Mossad officers. Rafi Eitan confirmed on the record that he 'met and ran Skorzeny.' Yosef Ra'anan managed the operation and Yitzhak Shamir headed the killing unit above it.
Skorzeny's price was removal from Simon Wiesenthal's list of wanted Nazi war criminals.
PROBABLY TRUEMultiple accounts report Skorzeny demanded to be taken off Wiesenthal's list as a condition of cooperating. The demand is well-reported; there is no evidence Wiesenthal actually issued him a clean bill, so we do not state that Mossad 'cleared' him as accomplished fact.
To shield ex-Nazi official Hans Globke from exposure at the Eichmann trial, West Germany made secret aid to Israel conditional on Israel's handling of the trial, and Ben-Gurion soft-pedaled Globke.
FACTWell-documented as mutual leverage rather than one-way blackmail. Adenauer conditioned loans and military aid on how Israel managed the trial; Ben-Gurion agreed to avoid fingering Globke. The March 1960 Ben-Gurion–Adenauer meeting is the pivot.
The claim that the West German BND was Mossad's 'junior partner' inverts the real hierarchy.
FACTThe Gehlen Organization and its successor the BND were founded and financed by the CIA — West Germany was America's junior partner in Cold War intelligence, not Israel's. The BND did run a covert liaison with Mossad from around 1956, but as an informal relationship between sovereign agencies.
- Shlomo Shpiro, academic work on BND–Mossad cooperation
- A Piece of Theater: West German–Arab–Israeli Relations Staged by Intelligence Services (Intelligence & National Security)
What the record settles, and the one thing it does not.
The spine of this story is solid. Egypt's German-scientist missile program, Operation Damocles, the November 1962 bombings, Krug's killing, the Skorzeny recruitment, and the Globke leverage are all documented across independent sources, much of it broken by Israeli journalists with access to former operatives.
The one thing the record does not settle is how Heinz Krug died. The Raviv and Melman account has Skorzeny personally driving him into a forest outside Munich and shooting him, with Mossad then destroying the body. Ronen Bergman's account, drawn from Mossad sources, has Krug abducted to Israel and dying under interrogation. Both come from serious investigators; they cannot both be right; the body was never found; and the usual dating of Skorzeny's recruitment to 1963 fits poorly with a hands-on forest killing in September 1962. So we assert only that Krug was killed in a Mossad operation, and we mark the manner as contested. A reader who wants the cinematic forest scene as fact is choosing one source over another the evidence does not let us rank.
Two smaller cautions. “Blackmail” overstates the West German arrangement; the record shows mutual leverage and a tacit trade. And the scientists' Nazi credentials vary — Pilz's Peenemünde V-2 pedigree is clear, Sänger's is looser — so “Nazi V-2 engineers” is right in the aggregate but should not be applied evenly to every name.
Every Cold War state recruited Nazis. This is Israel's entry in that ledger.
The reflex is to treat Nazi-recruitment as an American story (Operation Paperclip) or a West German one (the Gehlen Organization). It was broader than that. The United States took the rocket men to build ICBMs; Egypt took a different set to threaten Israel; West Germany rebuilt its intelligence service around Gehlen's Wehrmacht network; and Israel — the state founded in the shadow of the genocide — ran an ex-SS commando as an agent when it served a survival interest. Read side by side, these are not equivalences. They are a single, uncomfortable fact about how the postwar order actually used the people it claimed to be judging.
For this hub, the value is disciplined honesty about an ally's history. Recording that Israel hired a Nazi to stop other Nazis is not an attack on Israel; refusing to record it, when Israel's own press has, would be the failure. The grade discipline is what separates this from the propaganda that surrounds the same facts: we state what the record shows, mark the one dispute, and decline the cinematic embellishment.
Questions worth taking seriously
Isn’t “Mossad recruited Nazis” an antisemitic trope?
Did Skorzeny really kill Heinz Krug?
Does this mean Israel was sympathetic to Nazis?
Was West Germany blackmailed into helping Israel?
If you are named on this page
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This site aggregates and grades a record that other outlets and primary sources have already put on the record. Every FACT-graded claim above is sourced to court filings, government reports, sworn whistleblower disclosures, published investigative journalism, or named-source statements. The citations are the accountability mechanism; this section is how you get on the record too.
The investigative histories and contemporaneous reporting behind the record.
Every claim grades to one of FACT · PROBABLY TRUE · SOME SMOKE · PURE SPECULATION · FALSE / MISLEADING. The grade badge hedges; the prose does not.
- Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations (Random House, 2018).
- Dan Raviv & Yossi Melman, “The Strange Case of a Nazi Who Became an Israeli Hitman” (The Forward / Haaretz, 2016).
- R.T. Howard, Operation Damocles: Israel's Secret War Against Hitler's Scientists, 1951–1967 (Pegasus Books, 2013).
- Shlomo Shpiro, academic research on Israeli–German (BND–Mossad) intelligence cooperation.
- Contemporaneous and secondary reporting: Operation Damocles, Newsweek (2018), Times of Israel (Globke).
Full method: Methodology. Home hub: Israeli Influence. Cross-cut: The Dulles Blueprint and CIA Crimes.
Published August 2026. If a link 404s or a date is wrong, tell us via the Contact page and we will fix it publicly.